In forming various dough products, for example, danish, it is highly desirable to have a laminated texture in the final baked or cooked product. This has traditionally been achieved by forming alternating layers of fat and dough. This laminating can be done by hand or machine and in continuous operations of high volume output it is desirable to do it by machine.
Numerous laminating machines have been devised in the past but have met with shortcomings such as: complicated structure; lack of adjustability; unsanitary because of enclosures; excessive reciprocating conveyers; longer than necessary belts, etc. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,478,075 discloses a device for forming continuous laminated biscuit dough which uses three conveyers with two belts with all three conveyers moving in a reciprocating fashion.
Because doughs used in laminated products can be very fragile, it is very important to have a lapping machine which gently handles the dough and maintains a substantially constant or slightly increasing dough speed from the infeed conveyer of the laminator to the out feed conveyer of the laminator. The general concept of an intermediate conveyer to act as an accumulator, i.e. take up dough during the backstroke and give up dough during the forward stroke is taught by the above-cited patent.
Many other lappers have been devised but have had the above-listed problems, particularly their complicated structure and lack of adjustability.
The present invention provides a simplified, effective, gentle and adjustable dough lapper which overcomes the problems attendant with prior art lappers. The prevent invention also provides a lapper which is easily adjustable for different throughput rates of dough web.